A Journey in Astrophotography from our backyard

The Whale Galaxy and the Crowbar Galaxy are close neighbors from this perspective. Some wiki info:

NGC 4631 (also known as the Whale Galaxy or Caldwell 32) is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellationCanes Venatici. This galaxy’s slightly distorted wedge shape gives it the appearance of a herring or a whale, hence its nickname.[3] Because this nearby galaxy is seen edge-on from Earth, professional astronomers observe this galaxy to better understand the gas and stars located outside the plane of the galaxy.

NGC 4656/57 is a highly warped barred spiral galaxy located in the constellationCanes Venatici and is sometimes informally called the Hockey Stick Galaxies or the Crowbar Galaxy. The galaxy is a member of the NGC 4631 Group. A Luminous Blue Variable in “super-outburst” was discovered in NGC 4656/57 on March 21, 2005.

Imaged last night with a bit less than an hour of integration time. 180 second subs at 800ISO. Good dark area of the eastern sky for my location, but rather late in the night before they get up enough for a good look.

Around 6 degrees Fahrenheit last night while catching some images. This from Wikipedia:

NGC 2403 is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis. NGC 2403 is an outlying member of the M81 Group, and is approximately 8 million light-years distant.

Just north of straight up around 10:30 last night, I took 21 light frames of 180 seconds each at ISO800 plus darks, flats, and bias frames processed in Deep Sky Stacker and Photoshop CS2. Tracking was rather good for my setup on this high target with end of run RMS error just over 0.8 arc seconds. This is a cropped photo, since I still do not even have a Coma Corrector for this setup. Basically the edges of the picture are very distorted without the corrective lens. That is just the way optics work in a “fast” Newtonian telescope.

The Canon camera at this telescopes focal length of 610mm covers about 1.6 arc seconds per pixel, so if I believe the numbers, most of the time the imaging will stay within one pixel during exposure. Kinda mind boggling actually.

The Bode and Cigar are a galactic duo fairly high in the north sky these evenings. Wish I could stay up all night sometimes but I do like my sleep too! My setup is not automated to the point of trusting things to run themselves, so I still have to call it and shut down at some point. At least I can monitor things from the couch with one eye open while imaging.

Fireworks Galaxy taken 10/24. Still warm nights which is good for me but not so much for the camera performance. Tracking was decent and no wind to mess with me thank goodness. This one was a dozen five minute exposures but this is a dim target. Definitely will come back to this one.

NGC 891 is a galaxy seen from earth almost perfectly edge on. Very interesting target!. This is my image from last night with 9 frames at 5 minutes each. Now that it is getting dark earlier I don’t even have to stay up past midnight!

After months of summer smoke, I finally got out to do a little astrophotography last night. About an hour of stacked exposure on the Triangulum Galaxy. Several tries at image processing as I am still learning even the basic photoshop work. Fun stuff for my level!

Evil Eye Galaxy image from last night lives up to it’s name. Big fat moon limited the night when it came up, but it amazes me to see what is out there! One of the first images with the Canon T1i camera.